The centre cannot hold

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming.

When all the world came back

You tossed a blanket from the bed, 

You lay upon your back, and waited; 

You dozed, and watched the night revealing 

The thousand sordid images 

Of which your soul was constituted; 

They flickered against the ceiling. 

And when all the world came back 

And the light crept up between the shutters 

And you heard the sparrows in the gutters, 

You had such a vision of the street 

As the street hardly understands; 

Sitting along the bed’s edge, where 

You curled the papers from your hair, 

Or clasped the yellow soles of feet 

In the palms of both soiled hands.

T. S. Eliot, Preludes.

[Traducció de Marc Masdeu:

Vas estirar una manta del llit,

et vas ajeure d'esquena i vas esperar;

et vas mig adormir, i vas mirar la nit revelant

les mil imatges sòrdides

de què estava construïda la teva ànima;

parpellejaven contra el sostre.

I quan el món sencer va tornar

i la llum s'esllavissava entre els finestrons

i vas escoltar els pardals als canalons,

vas tenir una visió del carrer

com si el carrer a penes comprengués;

asseguda a la punta del llit, on

vas rinxolar els papers del teu cabell,

o vas prémer les plantes grogues dels peus

als palmells de les mans brutes.]

(Author of the picture: Richard Tuschman)